'Truth spoken without moderation reverses itself'
This blog is a source for intellectual exploration. It includes a list of alternative resources and a source of free books. The placement of an article does not imply that I agree with it, merely that I found it thought-provoking. There are also poems and book reviews. Texts written by me are labelled. Readers are free to re-post anything they like.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

DONALD TRUMP AND THE COMING FALL OF AMERICAN EMPIRE. By Jeremy Scahill // Unlearning the myth of American innocence: By Suzy Hansen

EVEN AS PRESIDENT DONALD Trump
faces ever-intensifying investigations into the alleged connections between his
top aides and family members and powerful Russian figures, he serves as
commander in chief over a U.S. military that is killing an astonishing and
growing number of civilians. Under Trump, the U.S. is re-escalating its war in
Afghanistan, expanding its operations in Iraq and Syria, conducting covert
raids in Somalia and Yemen, and openly facilitating the Saudi’s genocidal
military destruction of Yemen. Meanwhile, China has
quietly and rapidly expanded its influence without deploying its military on
foreign soil.

A new book by the
famed historian Alfred McCoy predicts that China is set to surpass the
influence of the U.S. globally, both militarily and economically, by the year
2030. At that point, McCoy asserts the United States empire as we know it will
be no more. He sees the Trump presidency as one of the clearest byproducts of
the erosion of U.S. global dominance, but not its root cause. At the same time,
he also believes Trump may accelerate the empire’s decline.

McCoy argues that the
2003 invasion of Iraq was the beginning of the end. McCoy is not some chicken
little. He is a serious academic. And he has guts. During the Vietnam
War, McCoy was ambushed by CIA-backed paramilitaries as he investigated the
swelling heroin trade. The CIA tried to stop the publication of his now classic
book, “The Politics of Heroin.” His phone was tapped, he was audited by the
IRS, and he was investigated and spied on by the FBI. McCoy also wrote one of
the earliest and most prescient books on the post-9/11 CIA torture program and
he is one of the world’s foremost experts on U.S. covert action. His new book,
which will be released in September, is called “In
the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.”

“The American Century,
proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, may already be
tattered and fading by 2025 and, except for the finger pointing, could be over
by 2030,” McCoy writes. Imagining the real-life impact on the U.S. economy,
McCoy offers a dark prediction:

For the majority of
Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of
rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness. After
years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2030
the U.S. dollar eventually loses its special status as the world’s dominant
reserve currency. Suddenly, there are
punitive price increases for American imports ranging from clothing to
computers. And the costs for all overseas activity surges as well, making
travel for both tourists and troops prohibitive. Unable to pay for swelling
deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally
forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad,
its forces begin to pull back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental
perimeter. Such a desperate move, however, comes too late.

For all their
patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate
to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of
white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however,
this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer
travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with
us. In these years after the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan,
and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant
across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use.
Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles.
You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking
something.

Some years after I
moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I
wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we don’t become
Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a
myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century
were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a
shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself... read more: